The Gateway of Sensation
La Puerta de la Sensación
A practice of turning toward difficult feelings and sensations with curiosity, discovering that we are ultimately safe to feel whatever arises.
The Gateway of Sensation
The two essential challenges
What comes up as the two essential challenges is thoughts.
The complexity of thoughts, and how the true nature of thought can be misunderstood or misinterpreted.
And the other has to do with the intensity of feelings, emotions, basically intensity of sensations.
If we're able to just keep clarifying and seeing through illusions of thoughts, to understand the essential nature of the thinking experience, that would end all the struggle and the fighting with the thinking mind.
But that can't be done on its own without addressing the intensity of sensation at the level of feelings and emotions, because as we clarify the nature of the mind we inevitably face more and more intensity at the level of feeling and emotion, which we could classify as just internal sensation, not the sensation of the skin or the body or physical pain, but still reactivity at the emotional and feeling body.
And that's really the essence, the nature of this.
As simple as that sounds, it's quite a challenge.
There's a lot of confusion along the way.
The tug of war
It always boils down to: I'm trying to control or avoid or change some intensity at the level of sensation, feeling, emotion, and using the imagination, the thinking mind, to do that.
So it's this tug of war between thinking, emotions, feelings.
The direction is to be able to relate with the sensations of feelings and emotions, to be able to experience them directly, to touch them in our experience and know them intimately, directly, to discover that we are ultimately safe.
There is no actual threat to our true nature, our essential beingness.
It is completely safe from all sensation, emotion, feeling.
No matter what appears at what intensity, we are ultimately safe to feel.
That comes first.
What comes next is we start to see more and more that thoughts are just thoughts, and they're not that important.
They come and go, and all of those illusions are seen as illusions, seen as thought.
All of what seemed real as more than thought is known to be just thought, and we become free from entanglement with trying to control and avoid.
Turning toward what's here
So with that as our prelude, just come to your current experience and observe, look, explore.
Find whatever feels like a problem, like it's difficult, like it's bothering.
Whatever it is: boredom or tension, fear, distress, pain, sadness, emptiness.
Whatever it is, there's going to be something.
Penetrate it with curiosity and openness, and also let it move and change, as it's going to be always shifting, morphing into something different, like a chameleon hiding so as not to be seen, not to be looked at directly.
Find that experience that you could say, "If only this was different, I would be okay."
Consider the possibility that this is a gateway, a doorway.
Through this, and only through this, all of what you've been looking for will be given.
What if?
Staying with the friction
Keep going there as if nothing else matters.
Staying with that struggle, that friction, that discomfort, that dissatisfaction.
Look to know its true nature.
What is it made of?
What are the thoughts it's made of?
The imagination, images based on memory, past, imagined present, future, images, sounds, inner dialogue, concepts.
Just the whole world of thought, one big movie play.
And in tandem, in the body and beyond: feelings, emotions, sensations.
At the heart level, at all levels.
Whatever is moving, from nothingness to boredom, loneliness, sadness, confusion, desperation.
What's the nature of desperation?
All of it.
Different flavors of sensations.
Just like the movie of thought, let it all just play out.
It does not need to be in any particular way in order to be fully satisfied and free.
That is something to explore, that possibility.
The sense of self at the center
Notice at the center of this struggle there's a sense of self.
Looking from, choosing from, struggling from, trying from.
Look to the heart of that.